Prehistoric & Ancient Gaul

The Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux

Magdalenian hunters paint the great galleries of Lascaux in the Vézère valley of the Dordogne, depicting aurochs, horses, and stags in a coordinated programme of monumental images.

Discovered in 1940 by four boys following a dog down a fox-hole, Lascaux contains nearly two thousand figures across some seven hundred metres of galleries. The Vézère valley as a whole, with sites such as Cro-Magnon, La Madeleine, and Font-de-Gaume, would give its name to two of the great phases of the European Upper Palaeolithic.

Farming spreads across Gaul

Two streams of Neolithic colonists converge on what will become Gaul: the Cardial Ware peoples of the Mediterranean coast and the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) farmers of the Rhine and Paris Basin.

Ancient-DNA analyses confirm a substantial influx of Anatolian-derived farmers carrying wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, and pigs, who slowly mixed with indigenous Mesolithic foragers. By 5000 BC the long-houses of the LBK reach the Seine, and the first communal monuments — passage tombs, dolmens, and the so-called Bougon mounds — begin to appear across the west.

The alignments of Carnac

On the southern coast of Brittany, Neolithic communities raise more than three thousand standing stones in long parallel rows at Carnac, alongside dolmens and tumuli that mark the dead.

The Carnac alignments — Ménec, Kermario, Kerlescan — are part of a wider Armorican megalithic tradition that includes the Grand Menhir Brisé of Locmariaquer, originally some twenty metres tall. The purpose of the rows remains debated: astronomical observatories, processional ways, and territorial markers have all been proposed.

Bell Beaker bronzes reach Gaul

Bell Beaker communities, riding the steppe-derived genetic transformation of Western Europe, spread bronze metallurgy across Gaul. New warrior burials with daggers and archer's wristguards appear from the Rhône to the Channel.

Hallstatt princes of eastern Gaul

The Hallstatt culture spreads west from the Eastern Alps into Burgundy and the upper Rhône. Iron weapons replace bronze, and a warrior aristocracy buries its dead under great tumuli with four-wheeled wagons and imported wine sets.

The princely burial of Vix, near Châtillon-sur-Seine, would dramatise the wealth of these chiefs: the tomb of a woman buried around 500 BC contained a Greek bronze krater more than 1.6 metres tall, the largest known piece of Greek metalwork, evidence of intense trade with Massalia and the Etruscans.

Phocaeans found Massalia

Greek colonists from Phocaea in Ionia found Massalia (Marseille) at the mouth of the Rhône, the first city of what will become Gaul. The legend of Gyptis and Protis remembers a marriage alliance with the local Segobrigian chief Nannus.

From Massalia the Greeks plant a string of trading colonies along the coast — Agathe (Agde), Nikaia (Nice), Antipolis (Antibes), Olbia, and Emporion further south — and push Mediterranean goods, the vine, the olive, and the alphabet into the Celtic hinterland. The voyage of Pytheas of Massalia around 325 BC will take Greek geography as far as Britain and the Arctic.

The flowering of La Tène art

A new Celtic style emerges around the Marne and the Moselle: curvilinear ornament of palmettes and tendrils, applied to swords, scabbards, gold torcs, and bronze flagons. It will be the visual language of the European Iron Age for four centuries.

Brennus and the sack of Rome

A war-band of Senones under Brennus crosses the Alps, routs a Roman army at the Allia, and sacks Rome itself. Only the Capitol holds out. The traditional date, 390 BC, will haunt Roman memory for centuries.

The Gallic sack is the founding trauma of Roman foreign policy: Polybius traces Rome's later wariness of the Cisalpine Gauls and Caesar's projection of a Gallic threat back to this catastrophe. Brennus' alleged words at the weighing of the ransom — vae victis, 'woe to the conquered' — would become a Latin proverb.

Rome carves out Gallia Narbonensis

Called by Massalia for help against the Saluvii and the Arverni, the consul Sextius Calvinus and his successors crush the southern Gauls. By 121 BC Quintus Fabius Maximus has earned the name Allobrogicus, and Rome organises the new province of Gallia Transalpina, soon called Narbonensis.

The colonia of Narbo Martius is founded in 118 BC, the first Roman citizen colony beyond the Alps. The Via Domitia is laid out to link Italy with Spain across the new province, and the wine, oil, and grain of southern Gaul are drawn into the imperial economy. Cicero would call Narbonensis 'rather a piece of Italy than a province'.

Caesar marches against the Helvetii

Julius Caesar, proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, halts the migration of the Helvetii at Bibracte and pushes Ariovistus' Suebi back across the Rhine. The Gallic Wars have begun.

Alesia: the fall of Vercingetorix

After a year of pan-Gallic revolt led by the Arvernian Vercingetorix, Caesar besieges him at Alesia behind a double line of fortifications. The relief army of all Gaul is broken, Vercingetorix surrenders, and the independence of Gaul is over.

Caesar's own Commentarii de bello Gallico — both campaign report and political pamphlet — would become the canonical Latin account and a foundational text of the Western military tradition. The captured Vercingetorix was paraded in Caesar's triumph of 46 BC and then executed in the Tullianum. He would later be reinvented in the nineteenth century as the first hero of the French nation.

Augustus divides the Three Gauls

Augustus reorganises the conquered territories into the imperial provinces of Aquitania, Lugdunensis, and Belgica — the Tres Galliae — alongside the older senatorial province of Narbonensis. Lugdunum (Lyon) becomes the capital of the Gauls.

In 12 BC his stepson Drusus dedicates the Altar of Rome and Augustus at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône, where delegates of the sixty Gallic civitates meet every August for the Concilium Galliarum. The cult of the emperor, served by a single Gaul elected as sacerdos, knits the new provinces into the imperial system.

The revolt of Florus and Sacrovir

Crushed by Roman debt and taxes, the Treveri under Julius Florus and the Aedui under Julius Sacrovir rise in revolt. Tiberius' general Gaius Silius defeats them near Augustodunum (Autun) and the rising collapses within months.

Claudius admits Gauls to the Senate

Born at Lugdunum, the emperor Claudius delivers a speech in the Senate — preserved both by Tacitus and on the bronze Lyon Tablet — granting senatorial eligibility to leading men of Gallia Comata. Gauls now sit among the patres of Rome.

The Batavian revolt

Exploiting the civil wars after Nero, the Batavian auxiliary commander Julius Civilis leads a great Rhine rising joined by the Treveri Julius Classicus and Julius Tutor. They proclaim an Imperium Galliarum at Trier before Cerialis crushes them on behalf of Vespasian.

The martyrs of Lyon

During the games of the Concilium Galliarum at Lugdunum, the Christian communities of Lyon and Vienne are denounced and tried. Forty-eight believers, including the slave-girl Blandina and the bishop Pothinus, die in the amphitheatre.

Their letter to the churches of Asia, preserved by Eusebius, is one of the earliest and most vivid martyr-acts. Eirenaios (Irenaeus), Pothinus' successor as bishop of Lyon and a pupil of Polycarp of Smyrna, would soon write Adversus Haereses, the foundational work of Latin theology in Gaul.

Postumus proclaims the Gallic Empire

After Valerian's capture by the Persians and a Frankish breakthrough on the Rhine, the legionary commander Marcus Cassianius Latinius Postumus is acclaimed emperor at Cologne. His Imperium Galliarum will rule Gaul, Britain, and Spain for thirteen years.

Postumus and his successors — Victorinus, the Tetrici — minted their own coinage, maintained their own senate, and held the Rhine while the central empire fought Persia and the Goths. The breakaway state would be reabsorbed by Aurelian after the bloodless surrender of Tetricus at Châlons in 274.

Maximian and the Bagaudae

Diocletian appoints Maximian as Augustus of the West with his capital at Trier. His first task is to crush the Bagaudae — peasant insurgents in Aquitania led by Aelianus and Amandus — and to restore the Rhine frontier against Franks and Alemanni.

Trier, made a tetrarchic capital, acquires its great basilica, baths, and the Porta Nigra. Diocletian's reforms split the four Gallic provinces into twelve smaller units, grouped under a new diocese of the Gauls and an overarching Praetorian Prefecture, the basic shape of late Roman administration in the West.

The Council of Arles

Constantine summons bishops from across the Western empire to Arles to settle the Donatist schism in Africa. The council — the first general gathering of the Latin Church — meets in the imperial residence of Arelate, soon to be the metropolis of southern Gaul.

Julian's victory at Strasbourg

The Caesar Julian, sent west by his cousin Constantius II with little experience and fewer troops, annihilates a great Alemannic confederation under Chnodomarius at Argentoratum (Strasbourg). The Rhine frontier is restored and Gaul saved from the brink.

From his headquarters at Lutetia (Paris) Julian rebuilt roads, remitted taxes, and reformed the corrupt civilian administration. Three years later, on the same parade-ground at Lutetia, his troops would raise him on a shield and proclaim him Augustus — beginning the brief pagan reaction of his sole reign.

The death of Martin of Tours

Martin, the soldier-turned-monk who founded the monastery of Marmoutier and became bishop of Tours, dies at Candes. His tomb on the Loire will be the first great cult-centre of Gallic Christianity and a model for the missionary bishop of the Latin West.

His friend Sulpicius Severus wrote the Vita Martini almost immediately, inventing the Latin saint's life as a genre. Martin's cloak (cappa), kept by the Merovingian kings, would give Frankish chapels their name. By 397 the rural sanctuaries of Gaul were being dismantled and the cult of the saints set in their place.

Stilicho strips the Rhine

To face Alaric's Goths in Italy, the western generalissimo Stilicho withdraws troops from the Rhine garrisons. The Gallic limes is left dangerously thin on the eve of the great crossing of the Rhine that will follow on the last day of 406.

By the close of the fourth century Gaul is still Roman in language, law, and church, but its provincial aristocracy — the world of Ausonius of Bordeaux and Sulpicius Severus — already lives among Frankish foederati on the Rhine, Alan settlements in the Loire valley, and Visigothic auxiliaries marching south. The age of Vandals, Sueves, Burgundians, and finally Clovis lies just beyond the close of this period.